Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

September 30, 2013

Hashtags - the wonderful concept that allows people to create their own controlled vocabulary to emphasis what they want to say or to refer to a general concept (usually on Twitter) is now going to be embraced by Google search. However, as with all things Google - there's a catch. They're only going to show up if the hashtag has been used in Google+ rather than something like Twitter. The idea is fairly obvious - results will appear, you'll click on them and lo and behold you'll end up looking through content at G+ rather than Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else.

It's going to look like this:

I had to borrow the screenshot from a very good Makeuseof article on the subject because it's a US option only at the moment.

Quite frankly, it's a shame. Google is continually trying to force its hand over search, and far from getting 'everything' - we're being limited more and more to just what Google thinks we should see - and that's always only going to be for their benefit, not the searchers. Just remember folks - Google is not your friend.

September 27, 2013

As you're probably aware, Google spends a lot of time tweaking results to attempt to make them better and more relevant. It does this several hundred times a year, but mostly it's on really subtle things, so virtually no-one notices it. Every now and then however, Google does a really big update, which changes a lot of results, and can cause real headaches for people, since the results you got yesterday are not the same as the results that you get today. Particularly a problem if you rely on Google to put your company name front and centre for specific searches!

Google gives this major updates names - a bit like we do with hurricanes. The last one was Panda, and the one before that was Caffeine in June 2010. So the short answer to the question 'What is Google Hummingbird?' is that it's a major change in the way in which Google interprets and returns search results. However, in more depth - Hummingbird is working with the Google Knowledge Graph results to try and provide you with more detail on concepts, rather than simple searches. So a search for Henry VIII will not only return you webpages, but it'll also provide you with basic factual information, details on his wives and so on.

Hummingbird works particularly well with mobile search - if you do a search for 'tell me about impressionist artists' for example, Google will provide some examples of them, as well as detailing webpages. If you ask Google for 'Pictures of Big Ben' it will find them, and if you then go on to ask 'how tall is it?' Google will assume that you're referring to Big Ben, rather than running a search for the phrase "how tall is it?" (Be aware though, if you try this using the web based version on a desk/laptop, that IS what Google will do.) However, depending on the search that you ask, Google is getting more intelligent. If you do a search asking to compare butter and olive oil Google will pull up some facts and figures for you - in a similar way that Wolfram|Alpha works.

What other changes can we expect? I was talking to Karen Blakeman, and we both agreed that we simply don't know yet. It's really far to early to tell what's going to happen in the longer term. Just be aware that if you run the same search regularly - if there's a sudden shift in the results that you get, it could well be Hummingbird working in the background.

September 18, 2013

If you're quick, you can check out the fake page but it won't - hopefully, last long. How did I find it? I happened to notice that a couple of contacts had liked the fake page because they had an update which said 'we have 200 Kindle Fire's which have slight package damage therefore they cannot be sold. So we are giving them away absolutely free! Want one? Share and Like this photo! Winners will be announced and messaged tomorrow evening. Good Luck!

Seriously? Tesco giving away products worth £100+ for free because of a damaged box? It's unlikely. So I followed the link. First thing that I noticed is that it doesn't say 'Tesco' it says 'Tesco.' and that full stop is really important, because it's a different word. Next thing - 236 likes. For Tesco? The real page has over 1 million likes. Third, there's no extra content on the page, and it should be brimming with information. Yet - nothing.

So what's going on? There are no Kindles, and this isn't a Tesco page. It's a fake, designed solely to get likes and comments. That pushes it up the Facebook rankings, and if it gets enough, someone will sell it, and the content can be changed to anything anyone else wants.

This is a blatent con - yet Facebook does nothing to stop this. They only act when they're forced to. They have NO interest in you or your wellfare, because they could easily stop the sale of Facebook pages, yet they don't because the more pages there are, the more advertising they can push.

Please - think carefully before you like pages. Don't leave your commonsense behind you. Don't trust Facebook, and keep sharp - because if you get fooled by this, think how easily you could get fooled by a real scammer, who knows what they are doing? I don't often ask for retweets etc, but I'd really like to get this post seen by as many people as possible - so please do retweet, and share on Facebook!

September 17, 2013

Trivia is always fun, and sometimes useful. Facebook recently shared some information about themselves which you might find helpful if you're producing training resources or presentations. It's a long article, but Mashable pulled out some good stuff, and I'm further distilling it here.

Facebook users have uploaded over a quarter of a trillion photographs.

There are on average 350,000,000 photographs uploaded per day. (Flickr users upload about 3.5 million per day)

September 13, 2013

I wrote about Zeeklythe other day and I got a very nice response from Jeffrey Sisk, their CEO. It's a really thorough response to my comments, and rather than add it as an edit, I thought it was worthy of repeating in full. Take it away Jeffrey:

"We appreciate the review you did recently on your blog of Zeekly.com.
Especially being a new site, we are searching the web reading what is
out there, and that includes reviews. We've had mostly good ones, but we
learn the most from the bad ones. I found yours personally very
interesting & informative. We have made a few updates, etc because
of your blog post. Zeekly is a work in progress, but our goal is a
terrific search engine that protects privacy.

First of all, we have included in the search results now the origin of
the link. We had left this off to have a cleaner page (and we are
getting ready to mix in results from our own proprietary web spider
zeeklybot), but you made a valid point, and I think you should know
where each result comes from. We tried to make it unobtrusive (gray) but
it is there now.

Regarding results... These are the top results of the top search engines
mixed together (it finds similar links and groups them as you can see
now, and if there are no groups it mixes the results in the order it
pulls them. The goal hear (or the expectation) is that users from each
of these engines who want privacy on Zeekly will be able to find results
they are used to getting from the one they were previously using. As we
mix in our own results over the next few weeks, we expect these search
results to get better, and we want to improve on what you are getting
from the top 3. I think you'd agree there is room for improvement. We
are experimenting with zeeklybot to achieve this goal before adding to
our results (and by the way, in contrast to other "privacy" search
engines out there, we are building our own web indexes on
hypertable/hadoop just like google). i.e. we are a "real" search
engine.. not just a meta engine. At any rate, if some of these results
are not impressive presently, they are coming straight from the big 3,
so my assumption is that you aren't impressed with them, either (and
neither am I for the record which is where zeeklybot will come in.. I am
very passionate about providing better search results, and we will get
there).

Adult content: We are very disappointed by the adult filtering provided
by google, yahoo and bing's API interfaces. It just doesn't work very
well. This will be a tougher issue to address, but we are working on a
solution. We have complete control over our own spidering technology,
but as stated, these results are coming straight from the other engines,
so we are going to have to figure out a mechanism to filter their
results if we want to offer a true adult filter on our site. This is
very frustrating to us, and a leading issue on the table.

I don't think we have any search engines right now that care about users
or their privacy. I realize we are new and will need to refine Zeekly
as we go along, but certainly we have the right motivations.
Additionally, webmasters have traditionally had a hard time especially
with google who changes algorithms frequently for no reason and causes
them a lot of trouble. In contrast, we want to build those relationships
and help webmasters get the proper placement organically for their
keywords. I truly this this has been a tactic by the big engines to get
PPC advertisers. In the early days of the web, sites providing good info
on subjects rose to the top. How funny this changed once sponsored
advertising came along (I rest my case).

Almost forgot.... I have noticed (like you did) that one of the feeds
from the "big three" isn't doing a good job with phrase search. Maybe
with it being visible now in the search results where they are coming
from, one of us can figure out who's interface is doing such a poor job
with this. Once we do, I'll contact them and ask them to improve it."

September 09, 2013

If you're happy to sell your soul to Amazon, or you're not bothered about them not paying the tax that they should, you're going to want to know about the books you can get for free or for a small sum of money to read on your Kindle or Kindle app device. If that's the case, you might want to try BookDip which says of itself "Daily Deals on Bestselling Kindle eBooks from Big Name Authors" Basically you just sign up and tell them what sort of category of books you're interested in, and then they send you a daily email with hand picked free or heavily discounted titles. They only send information on books by wel known authors and/or which have got very positive reviews. I'm not entirely sure how they work that out, or what their criteria is, so you may find that they're bang on the money for you or totally off the wall.

Alternatively, if you don't fancy BookDip, try Book Gorilla which does something very similar. This one says of itself "BookGorilla sends you a single daily email alert with the best deals on books that match your reading preferences, including bestsellers and freebies!" I've tried this one, but not BookDip, and it does send an email a day. The only problem that I have with this is that you do tend to glaze over very quickly; I only have a couple of categories chosen, and they send huge numbers of suggestions every day, though to be fair, you can limit to 12, 25 or 50 - I've set a limit of 25, but it seems so many more! However, you can of course unsubscribe whenever you like.

I do know that there are more services than this - these are just a couple that I've discovered recently - if you have others that you know, or want to suggest your own, please add details in the comments.

September 06, 2013

If you've ever searched Twitter using their advanced search function (or indeed their basic one come to that) you'll know that it's not very good. Once upon a time it used to go back a month or so - now you're lucky if it goes back a week. So how do you find that tweet from nineteenhundred and frosty weather? Help is at hand in the form of Topsy at http://www.topsy.com/

It has a database of every tweet back to 2006, which is the region of about 425 billion tweets. Twitter is now pushing out somewhere in the region of 400-600 million tweets per day and each one is indexed on Topsy within 150 milliseconds - which is a statistic that I can barely comprehend - I don't know about you! If you'd like another statistic - the amount of data being produced by Twitter and Facebook is more than the rest of the web combined. It's all on Google? I really don't think so.

If you're concerned about your privacy, you'll know that search engines generally keep fairly close tabs on you and your searches. There are a number of search engines available that don't track you, such as DuckDuckGo and Ixquick. Now there's a new kid on the block - Zeekly. It pulls results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, YouTube and so on, and provides this information 'to you in a safe and secure environment that protects your privacy'.

At first glance it looks good - there are options to search the web, images, video, news, Amazon, sports, audio, forums, wikis, blogs, pdfs and a dictionary, so it's really quite comprehensive. It also has an advanced search function for keyword, phrase, domain, exclude word/domain, which isn't brilliant, but it'll do.

However, once you start to delve below the surface, things are not quite as rosy. It doesn't tell you where it's pulled its results from; if I'm using a meta search engine I rather like to know that. The ranking system used is quite bizarre. I did a search for my name - the first hit was for the baseball player - which is quite common, but the second result was for 'Phil and Derek's continental cuisine', and Zeekly seems to be working on words in the URL and title, but it was only picking up 'Phil', and not the actual phrase that I'd put in. In fact, it seemed to ignore my phrase search entirely, which wasn't impressive. There's a 'quick look' option, which pulls the website page into the results for you to take a look at, and this only worked some of the time, and it was really quite slow.

I took my search across to images, and as some of you know, I have a namesake who is something of an upstanding member of the adult film industry, if you get my drift. I blinked a few times I have to say. There's no option to have a safe search, so given the number of adult images for just about any term you like, it renders the image search virtually unusable in a work or educational environment. The same goes for the video search option as well.

Overall, it was quite a disappointing search engine, and one that promised so much at the outset.

September 02, 2013

Today I am mostly working on my material for Internet Librarian International, which is taking place on the 15thand 16th of October, with workshops on the 14th. I'm co-running a Websearch Academy workshop with the ever wonderful Marydee Ojala and always wise Arthur Weiss. During the conference, I'm speaking on Privacy issues, ethics and resources in which I look at how easy it is to be tracked on the web, and what you can do about it, and a Search Slam with Marydee in which we challenge delegates to share their teaching techniques regarding online searching.